Even after 25 years in America, former South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky is regarded as a national hero by three million fellow expatriots. He travels widely in the US and abroad, and is recognized and applauded by former US servicemen, to whom he remains a charismatic and admirable figure.
Buddha's Child will flood the shadowy corners of South Vietnam's Byzantine political world with the bright light of truth. Ky will describe the Americans and their activities from the perspective of the Vietnamese patriot.
Condemned by US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as "the absolute bottom of the barrel," Ky was not expected to survive a week in the office into which he was thrust. Instead, he lasted three years, until he wrote himself out of office by penning the country's first constitution.
The prime minister of Vietnam from 1965 to 1968 has written a book about his experiences during the most turbulent period in his country's modern history. Dick Hill's terrific narration and the sense that this is the other side talking make this one great tale. Hill knows how to tell the story so that it's engrossing as history and as the story of one man's attempts to win the Vietnam War for the South. With great force and resonance, Hill relates Ky's outrage, frustration, and incomprehension at U.S. actions. His voice is deliberate and unemotional, but when he does become involved in the text, it hits like a tidal wave. Almost 30 years have passed since this episode, but Hill's timing, pacing, and evenhandedness ensure this story's freshness. R.I.G. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Nguyen Cao Ky was the Prime Minister of South Vietnam for three years, until he wrote himself out of office by penning his nation's first constitution. The intimate of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Bob McNamara, and other American leaders, he has lived in the US for 25 years.
Marvin J. Wolf, who photographed Ky for the US Army in Vietnam in 1965, is the author of nine books, including the bestselling biography of American Indian leader Russell Means, Where White Men Fear To Tread (1995).
